


I prove a theorem and the house expands

by apprenticenanoswarm



Category: Transformers: Beast Wars
Genre: ADHD, But also very much in love, Dinobot has feathers, Dyscalculia, Gen, Learning Disabilities, M/M, Neurodiversity, grumpy old assholes being grumpy old assholes, i don’t know when grass evolved but let’s be honest neither did the showrunners, thank you rita dove for the title
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 07:01:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28952376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apprenticenanoswarm/pseuds/apprenticenanoswarm
Summary: In which being a Proud Warrior Archetype is a useful way to disguise how bad you are at math.
Relationships: Dinobot/Rattrap (Transformers)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 21





	I prove a theorem and the house expands

Dinobot always kicked up a fuss when instructed to help Rattrap with ship repair and maintenance. 

_Always_.

He’d do it, eventually, but he’d invariably grumble and claim that such menial tasks were beneath his dignity. Often, he’d avoid active participation if he could get away with it.

If the job in question happened to be something like patching a hole the Preds had blasted in the Axalon’s side, something that necessitated a lot of heavy lifting, he’d take the lead, eager to show off his strength. If it was anything else – counting and cataloguing computer errors, reviewing calculations concerning their energy resources, noting the dates and times repairs were implemented – all the basic, basic stuff Rattrap could do in his sleep, Primus, would he ever sulk. Sit back with his arms folded and a scowl on his face, not doing a damn thing unless given specific instructions to do that damn thing and always taking twice as long as Rattrap would have taken if he’d just done it himself.

It was, frankly, maddening.

Not that Rattrap planned to _stop_ begging Optimus to insist that Dinobot helped him out. Not a chance. Even if he was about as useful as a rock, even if all he did was stand in a corner sullen as a stormcloud, he was still Dinobot. Still the most sour, sarcastic, wickedly entertaining thing on this whole dull backwater planet. The thought of his not being there to bicker with and break up the monotony was intolerable. Rattrap would proudly proclaim himself a coward to anyone who asked but in truth, there was one thing he feared more than death, and that was boredom.

The subject of today’s squabble had been dreamed up by Rattrap last night (and yes, he did have better things to do with his time than lie awake on his berth inventing ways to annoy Dinobot; he just hadn’t felt like doing any of them), and he’d grinned at his ceiling with fiendish glee.

“So what you’re tellin’ me,” he said, pretending to be absorbed in the task of adding data to the screen in front of him, though he could, by this point, have done it with his optics deactivated, “is that you’ve _never been_ to the Neon Lounge.”

Frostily, because he’d caught on quick that he was being baited, Dinobot said, “That is accurate.”

They were, at the moment, alone together in a dim corner of the ship’s engine room, working their way through some basic diagnostics. Well, Rattrap was working; Dinobot was, at the moment, merely lurking.

“Seriously?”

“Yes. Not that it’s any of your business, rodent.”

“Right. Sure. Wow.”

The Axalon’s computer was, on its best day, about 55% operational, thanks to all the components that had been straight up atomised in the crash. (And, yeah, she’d not been in the best of shape even before that. They’d been a research vessel; still were, if you asked Optimus. No one on Cybertron was throwing money at research vessels these days.) Rattrap always ended up having to do a ton of calculations in his head whenever there was a maintenance issue. He squinted at the screen and muttered a string of sums under his breath before adding, “Just seems weird, is all.”

Resigned, like he knew better but couldn’t help himself, Dinobot leaned back against the wall and grumbled, “Why?”

Rattrap added his numbers to the screen and cursed as it became a black wall. “Scrap. Gonna have to start again. Gimme that data pad over there.”

A low hiss. “Tedious.”

“Yeah, yeah. Won’t be much longer. So; the Neon Lounge. Biggest nightclub and adult entertainment venue in Iacon. Crazy popular with tourists.”

“You think I would go all the way to Iacon just to visit a glorified brothel? Ha! Travelling to anywhere within ten miles of that cursed city is unbearable. Have you _seen_ the state of their public transport system? It is a _disgrace_.”

“Nah, I don’t think you’d go all the way there just for the Lounge. But I figure you might have gone for the War Museum. They’re _real_ close together.”

“I’m aware.”

“You’re not happy about it?”

“I am not.”

Rattrap gave the humming black box at his side a smack and a green light came on. “Don’t like the idea of sparkly hookers distractin’ people from all those dead soldiers you go gooey-eyed over, I guess.”

“Keep your unwarranted accusations to yourself, Maximal. My government was pushing to legalise sex work long before yours. No, my objection is rooted in the fact that ever since the Lounge became a tourist attraction, the whole district’s character changed. Entrance to the museum is still free, but purchasing a single energon cube from the stand outside costs three times what it does most anywhere else in Iacon – to say nothing of the crowds, the lack of seating, the gaudy advertisements on every-…”

“Okay, okay, okay, I get it. Ugh. If it wasn’t for all the, y’know, random violent stabbings, you might be the most boring person I’ve ever met.”

Numbers began rolling across the screen again, a moment before the black box threw off sparks and the green light went out. Rattrap kicked it across the room, swore in three languages, and started working on the data pad instead. It was ancient and slower than a cityformer’s corpse, but it was reliable at least.

“My _point_ is that I know for a fact you’ve been to the War Museum. Remember last year when I got bored and raided your quarters and you dangled me over a waterfall?”

Dinobot smiled nostalgically. “Your screams were uncommonly shrill.”

“Don’t like heights. Screw you. Anyway, I found that tiny statuette of Grimlock. Super cute. They sell those at the War Museum’s gift shop; nowhere else. So you’ve been there.”

“What a shameless little burglar you are, to be sure.”

“My point is that for a mech to visit the War Museum and _not_ visit the Neon Lounge, even though they’re both popular, famous, right next door, and the tourism department basically designed it so that traffic from one would flow right into the other… that means you deliberately avoided it.”

“Why is that remarkable? Some people just don’t like that sort of thing.”

Now they were closing in on what Rattrap really wanted to ask. “And you’re one of ‘em?”

“What?”

“You don’t like that sorta thing. That sorta thing being sex. That what you’re sayin’?”

“That’s also none of your business.”

“Hey, just curious. Not gonna be a sleaze about it. Optimus don’t like sex neither. Ain’t got a problem with that at all.”

Sarcasm thick as tar: “How gentlemanly of you.”

“I mean, me, myself, personally, I like sex. Like it a _whole_ lot.”

“Mmm. You’ve mentioned that. So often and with such insistence that one begins to suspect that you’re lying.”

“What? No!”

“One’s suspicions are buoyed by the fact that despite your self-proclaimed lechery, you’ve never attempted to seduce even one of the three adults in whose company you’ve been stranded for eighteen years.”

“I just told you, Optimus ain’t into that. Rhinox is my best buddy and I don’t want to mess that up. And you… you…”

Now sweet as sugar: “Yes, valued comrade?”

“You’re ugly.”

That actually got a laugh. A smug, disbelieving laugh.

_Demon. Monster. Scumbag. Arrogant slagger. Hate you so much._

Accepting that this conversation had gone to the Pit, just like every other time he tried to find out if Chopperface was even a little bit interested in him, Rattrap hunched over the data pad. “Drop dead. And add up those, will ya?”

He pointed to the screen mounted on the wall on Dinobot’s left.

It was cracked and blurry, but the column of figures he needed was visible enough if you stood close and peered. Ordering Dinobot to do something stupid easy yet vaguely irritating like that was a good way to shut him up whenever they were working on a project for the duration of which Rattrap was nominally in charge. That allowed Rattrap to pointedly ignore him for a couple minutes while they both devised strategies for their next round of banter.

Only today, this time, Rattrap didn’t ignore him.

He pretended to; kept his head down and his fingers dancing across the pad. But all that talk of the Lounge had got him on edge, got him worked up, and that damn laugh was still echoing in his ears, so he watched Dinobot out the corner of his eye, angry.

Hungry.

Because he did like sex, and more than that, he liked just… having someone. Back on Cybertron, he’d had three steady boyfriends, a dozen fuckbuddies, and about thirty acquaintances he flirted with on the regular because, yeah, he was a slut for drama, but also because being lonely made him violently miserable.

Eighteen years. Eighteen long, lousy years he’d now gone without being touched, except when someone was punching him or dangling him over a waterfall.

So, just for once, he let himself watch.

And he noticed something he’d never noticed before.

Chopperface was scowling at the screen like it had plucked one of his feathers. Nothing surprising there; he scowled at basically everything, unless it was something he was actively trying to kill, in which case he’d grin like the bloodthirsty maniac he was.

But it wasn’t a disinterested scowl. It wasn’t the way you scowled when you’d been given a boring-ass job to do.

No, it was a scowl of concentration; the way you scowled when a job was demanding every inch of your attention and you were less than one hundred percent confident you knew what you were even doing.

Which…

…what?

There were _five numbers_ on the screen. Rattrap knew because he had, in fact, already looked and completed the requisite calculation; he’d only asked Dinobot to do it to derail an increasingly embarrassing discussion.

Five numbers. Adding them up had taken Rattrap 0.2 seconds. Granted, he’d been built specifically for this stuff, but still, it shouldn’t have taken the average mech more than twenty seconds to come up with a result. At most.

Four and a half minutes had now passed.

And Dinobot was still scowling. Still concentrating. His lips moved silently.

With tremendous effort, Rattrap clamped down on the instinct to tease. Instead, he muttered, “Ugh, just remembered Rhinox wants me to clean out the fuel basin later. Why do I always get stuck with the worst jobs?”

“Because you’re disgusting,” said Dinobot, absently, like it was automatic, and then added, “and because the hatch broke and you’re the only one small enough to fit through it now.”

“Hmph. Still unfair.”

Another minute passed.

“Eight thousand and seventeen,” Dinobot reported, clearing his throat.

Rattrap glanced down at the corner of his data pad where the number eight thousand two hundred and twenty-six had been blinking for the last few hours. “Right. Okay, almost done here.”

0

After that, he started paying attention.

Pretty soon, he was wondering how he’d ever missed it.

They were out in Zone Fourteen, helping Optimus catalogue and collect samples from a field of wildflowers. Rattrap didn’t know exactly why Optimus insisted on dragging them along, except that maybe he still harboured hopes of their learning to share his awe at the wonders of nature and science.

“Well, well, well,” their leader said, bending down to study a small, lumpy, grey-green growth. “What have we got here? I do believe it’s a type of fungus. Oh – oh, Rattrap, come look. Its microscopic structure is _fascinating_.”

“Real cool, boss,” Rattrap murmured, his focus elsewhere.

Dinobot was standing over their table of sealed samples, posture as tense as though he was bracing for a sniper to plant one in the back of his head. They were all clearly labelled and he’d been ordered to arrange them numerically before slotting them into the various compartments in Optimus’ bag. Ordinarily, Rattrap would have whined about getting stuck with the infinitely crummier job of getting down on his hands and knees in the dirt to snip tiny leaves and petals, but today, he just watched.

There were forty-eight samples so far. Eight of them were arranged in a neat little row on Dinobot’s left. The others, on his right, were haphazardly stacked, and he was picking through them with what was, when you looked close enough, an air of quiet, controlled desperation, the way Rattrap picked through wires when the bomb he was trying to defuse had forty seconds left on the clock.

_That one,_ he thought, watching Dinobot huff and set down a sample. _That’s the next in sequence. C’mon, pick it up, you can do this._

When Waspinator and Scorponok jumped out from behind cover and started shooting at them, Rattrap was, for the first time, massively relieved to find himself in the middle of a life-or-death gunfight.

In the chaos, it only took a second to line up a shot that ricocheted off Scorponok’s leg and blew up their sample table.

“Whoops. Sorry,” he said to Optimus when the Preds had been chased off.

He sighed heavily. “Never mind. These things happen. Alright, people, pack it up. Let’s not do any more damage to this poor ecosystem.”

0

Optimus wasn’t a tyrant but he ran a tight ship. Their chores and the times by which they needed to be completed were sent to their quarters’ personal computers every morning on a meticulous, detailed spreadsheet.

Hacking into Dinobot’s was ridiculously easy.

“Hmm,” said Rattrap, reviewing the hundreds and hundreds of schedules that had never been opened, or had been opened once and closed again a second later.

When he was on monitor duty with Rhinox that evening, he laced his enquiries into their usual casual chitchat. “Hey, buddy, I was wonderin’ – who d’you think’s uglier between Dinobot and me?”

Accustomed to Rattrap’s propensity for pointless questions when bored, Rhinox mulled it over before saying, “Personally, I think you’re better looking. But it’s a matter of taste.”

“Uh-huh. And who’s a better shot? Me or him?”

“You. Obviously. But he already knows that, so it’s not going to do you much good if you’re looking for something to gloat about. Honestly, he probably considers excellence in marksmanship ‘dishonourable’ or something.”

“Heh, yeah, prob’ly. Okay, who’s better at getting their chores done?”

“Hmm. That’s a tough one. You slack off at every given opportunity except when it comes to tasks you know only you can complete. On the other hand, you don’t pester me every morning.”

“Pester?”

“ _Every_ damn morning,” he grunted. “The first thing he does is stalk up to me and demand to know what ‘tiresome grunt work’ I’ve got lined up for him. It’s like he never even bothers to look at his schedule.”

“Must be real irritatin’.”

0

The ship’s computer offered a limited variety of games – they weren’t a pleasure cruise, after all – and Cheetor had, of course, played every one of them a hundred times already. He complained endlessly that Optimus hadn’t added any first person shooters, racers, or platformers before they’d left Cybertron; every halfway-entertaining game they had was intensely cerebral and demanded some level of numeric pattern recognition and puzzle-solving.

Often, he invited the others to join him. Every few weeks, Rattrap would drop by his quarters and spend a few hours kicking his ass at Polyhex Blackjack.

“Spots, wanted to ask – can ya tell me which of these ol’ Dinobutt is really bad at?”

Cheetor laughed. “No way you’ll ever get him to play with you, RT. He’d say it’s...”

To Rattrap’s surprise, the kid pulled off a passable imitation of Dinobot’s growling rasp: “‘… _conduct most unbecoming of a warrior_ ’.”

Cackling, Rattrap said, “Nice. So he never plays at all?”

“Well, actually, there _was_ one time I finally nagged him until he agreed to a couple of games. And – okay, you didn’t hear this from me, alright? – he was _terrible_ at them. Even worse than Tigatron and Tigatron used to be worse at games than anyone I ever met. We ended up trying seven and he sucked at all of them! Even the boring strategy-focused ones I expected him to be good at! Got really grumpy about it, too. I guess Preds just aren’t into any kind of fun that’s not creepy or super ultra violent.”

“Mmm. I guess.”

0

How in slag had Tarantulas snuck on board?

How in the name of Primus had he made it all the way into the command centre?

Who had fucked up, _how_ had they fucked up this badly, and how many dents was Rattrap going to put in them if he survived this rotten, rotten day?

“We need to retreat!” Rhinox bellowed, ducking as one of their own security drones shot at them.

Dinobot blew a hole in the drone with his optic lasers and snarled “Cowardice!” before a second drone blasted him back a good twenty feet. Which, yes, was hilarious, but also meant there was now one less large body standing between Rattrap and an extremely messy death at the hands of his own friggin’ computer.

_When I get hold of that spider, I’m gonna pull off his legs and tie them together and twist them into a helix and cram them all the way up his…_

“Rhinox is right,” said Optimus, calm but terse, crouched nearby. “I’ve got a plan, but we’ll need to get down to Deck C to implement it.”

Another barrage of lasers made them all fling themselves horizontal. Rattrap’s rifle was shot out of his hands.

“Okay, on three. Whoever’s closest to the exit, open it up! We’ll fall back one by one,” Optimus ordered, returning fire.

Rattrap got out his pistol and helped, waiting for the gentle hiss that would signal the door’s drawing back. When it didn’t come, he looked over his shoulder.

Dinobot was closest to the door, his finger stabbing the panel again and again. Every sixth time he added a new number, the red light indicating an incorrect code flashed.

“Hurry up!” Cheetor yelped as a shot grazed his arm.

Muttering a prayer to anyone who might be listening, Rattrap broke cover and darted across the floor. He smacked Dinobot’s hand out of the way and typed in the code himself before shouting, “We’re clear! Let’s go!”

They got to Deck C. They dealt with Tarantulas. They patched themselves up and started repairing the ship.

Dinobot didn’t look at Rattrap even once.

0

The next day, Rattrap was bringing Optimus a report on all the bugs he’d rooted out of the command centre – figurative and literal because _Primus_ , Tarantulas was _so, so gross_ – when he bumped into Dinobot coming the other way.

“Chopperface! Finally. Listen, I wanted to talk to you about-…”

“Later,” Dinobot grunted and stalked off down the corridor.

Rattrap huffed, folding his arms. “That’s the thanks I get? Nice. Jerk.”

When he stormed into Optimus’ office, mood thoroughly soured, the first thing he said was, “What did the world’s angriest rooster want to talk about?”

Optimus was sitting at his desk, looking contemplative. “Ordinarily, I’d say it was a private matter. But he explicitly gave me permission to pass the information on to you and the others, which is reasonable, considering that yesterday it impacted all of us.”

“Ah. So he told you about the numbers problem.”

“Somehow I suspected you might already know. Yes. Although it’s not just a numbers problem; it’s numbers, calculations, measurements, patterns, sequences… some variety of dyscalculia unique to Predacons.”

Rattrap scratched a fleabite. “Heard of it. Long story short; someone needs to manufacture a fresh batch of fighters real quick, maybe they’ve got a gig coming up that needs extra security or whatever, and it’s not cost-effective to equip them with anythin’ but the basics.”

Optics wide, Optimus sputtered, “That – that is _extremely_ illegal. Not to mention unethical.”

Occasionally, Rattrap was reminded that despite being a badass, despite being a seasoned academic, and despite often coming across like one of those wise old philosopher kings from kids’ stories, Captain Optimus Primal was less than half his age.

“Yeah,” he said with a shrug. “But it happens all the time. Used to happen a lot more. You’d get bots who couldn’t see colour because they were going to work on worlds with almost no sunlight. Bots who couldn’t learn more than one language. Couldn’t understand music as anything other than random noises. Couldn’t imagine. And some who really, really, really suck at math.”

“Surely that’s fixable. The past few decades have seen tremendous innovations in…”

“There’s docs who can augment or upgrade you, sure. Problem is, those guys are expensive. Like, ‘maybe I’ll just buy my own starship instead’ expensive.”

Optimus tapped his large fingers on the edge of the desk. “He didn’t mention any of that. I suppose he was embarrassed. Rattrap, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t deploy any of this during your squabbles.”

“Wasn’t planning to,” Rattrap snorted, folding his arms. “There’s so much I can’t stand about the guy, you think I’m gonna go after somethin’ that isn’t even his fault? Gimme some credit, boss.”

0

Standing alone in a quiet glade, glaring up at a perfectly innocent bird’s nest as though it harboured Megatron himself within its mess of twigs, Dinobot ignored Rattrap’s approach right up until he chucked a data disk at the back of his head.

“‘Voyage of the Restless Stars’,” Rattrap announced, sauntering out of the bushes with an energon cube in hand. “You’ve read it, yeah?”

Clearly only very slightly more confused than he was angry, Dinobot glanced down at the disk now lying in a patch of grass. “Of course. Everyone has. It’s a masterpiece.”

“Not me. Tried. Tried sixteen times. Most books or poems I give up on after five. But I really wanted to read that one. I had a girlfriend once at Iacon University who wrote her whole thesis about it.”

After a pause, Dinobot picked up the disk, dusting it off. “Many people find reading it challenging. It’s Lord Skybite’s longest and most complex work. The audiobook is easier to get through.”

Rattrap shook his head. “Not for me. Reading stories, listening to stories, even watching stories acted out… it doesn’t work. Can’t follow what the scrap’s going on for more than three minutes at most. Guy who built me was an engineer and, according to him at least, an entrepreneur; needed someone to do the legwork of keeping his inventions up and runnin’ while he was showing them off to investors. Didn’t need me to read. Didn’t really need me to think; had to learn that myself.”

“Ah. I see. You’ve been talking to Optimus.”

“Yep.”

“And this is your attempt at ‘bonding’ or some such rubbish.”

“Actually,” Rattrap said, peering up at the nest and contemplating how much the beady-eyed matriarch nestled within reminded him of his companion, “this is my attempt at flirting.”

“You… what?”

“So, back to the subject; books. One thing that _does_ work, sometimes, is someone reading ‘em to me. But it can’t be a recording. They’ve gotta be there, and they’ve gotta slow down when I say slow down, and let me interrupt and ask questions, and remind me who the characters are and everything.”

Understanding dawned on Dinobot’s face. “The experience needs to be interactive.”

“Exactly. How ‘bout it? You do this for me, I’ll take over whatever chores you can’t do.”

Dinobot hesitated before saying, “Optimus has already informed me that I will no longer be assigned tasks to which I am… ill-suited.”

“Oh. Okay.”

He was going to add, _How about a kiss, then?_ before remembering that Dinobot had never actually told him whether or not he was into sex or sex-related stuff.

“Somethin’ else you want in return?” he said instead.

A scowl. A shuffle. A twitch.

Eventually, roughly, Dinobot replied, “Perhaps, if we ever return to Cybertron, you could accompany me to the War Museum. While their refreshments and souvenirs are, in my opinion, over-priced, they might be acceptable if we pooled our financial resources.”

“Wow,” Rattrap marvelled. “Chopperface, over the course of my frickin’ illustrious life I’ve had a lot of people ask me out, but no one’s ever done it quite that badly.”

“You really are incredibly irritating.”

Rattrap flattened himself against Dinobot’s chest – well, against his torso, he couldn’t reach his chest – and beamed up at him. “Can we go to the Neon Lounge afterwards?”

“If we must.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“One.”

“And you’ll dance with me?”

“I might consider it.”

“Cool.”

**The end**


End file.
